elect, no statements to vote on, not even any real rivals slugging it out for the job of Party secretary or negotiating for a shot at the Party platform. There is no platform committee at Forza Italia. "Everything is Silvio," one Forza Italia councilman I met in Rome said, and even Berlusconi sounded a litde weary when he talked about the amount of time he was forced to spend at rallies where the most interesting thing that happens is that "all the people want to touch me," making it impossible for him to leave. But, as the councilman put it, "when Silvio doesn't show, we lose." A month after the 2001 elections, the deputies in Berlusconi's coalition- he calls it the House of Liberties-in- stalled a Milan defense lawyer and new Forza Italia deputy named Gaetano Pecorella as chairman of the Justice Com- mission of the Italian House of Deputies. Pecorella, it was pretty much assumed, was there to make Italy's punishments fit Italy's crimes by making laws that Berlu- sconi and his entourage would find more tolerable than the ones that were costing them so much time, money; and embar- rassment. Pecorella kept on practicing law '''''''''''''''''.., .".:-:;':. u. v. ".: .....;. n.': :"." :- :<.:-: . " - .:. . .", ." ::-"r... :-.".": - .::: :- - :::::-" .:-. : :_': : . ....... .." -- . '.; '-i;;:" }. ',: '" ;.' (. o - . .-. .,...... .... '. r..... . . .-'.' ; ' -" f ' h\J ::, , ' <:' , ! ' f :i ;i _ h . .. .. . .. - . -. .. , ' """", , , " ,', '" I "';' "" ' , ' .'. ..........: . ".." 0; . -. ":. , i : " Q, h .".-". ..... . ." ...... ... .. ,.., .' ""# ...- -.. .. '". , - . .-' ....'.- { L )':: . :.:; ... , . ..- ,:: f/ .# ' íri t:t{ ;J' -.;, . . - .:.: :.....,.. '-' - - . . .' . {\".{) .-i ,;-:::-:-..: "-:.," :",-: ":';,,: l 1 )i ' .' ..--:-J'",'.".. ":'<1 '",,' "",' .... ", .. (. .:':') "':: :.: . ': ,';i:' .. t{ Y' , ; :.. ;:....w.:.. .:. / :'F i.::, ;,t; ii', . ::' : i:: rE. i:\S.,.;" ': : i ; " ....)!;, . :d ?' 1;, . ;.c" ., . - ," ;,' " " ó. t Ù': ' F" in Milan. It wasn't prohibited, and--since in Italian politics anything not specifically prohibited is embraced-after a decent interval he was, in his words, "invited" onto a team of lawyers permanently re- tained by the Prime Minister to exhaust his prosecutors and forestall his trials until the new laws were passed. (Pecorella's view of his own conflict of interest, at least as he put it to me, was: "It's a continuation of my liberal path." He said that Rome was mornings, Milan was afternoons.) The result of this tireless commute has been that, whilePecorella and his legal partners were busy prolonging the Prime Minister's most recent trial--at one point, they presented the court with a list of eighteen hundred defense witnesses to schedule-Pecorella and his parliamen- tary partners were devoting themselves almost exclusively to exempting the Prime Minister from the fruits of his old indis- cretions and to cancèlling any new ones he might commit. In the countdown to Italy's European presiden parliament downgraded the kinds of financial crimes that Berlusconi was most often accused of committing (double bookkeeping, for one) to the level of misdemeanors, which ',", ;,' l'ff ::i:, ,,'-,> , ,\" <"'-" to." . '. ::.. .} >. . ......... :',?\, -:t,;g " ' , " , " ," f .ø.:: , '. , " ," "' , .. . . ".. .," .:,; .. .: "<:-.. . . . . . ._. . . . '. ,', .: . .:." .., .: " "..: 'T> . ,t< : : :/ . ; :. . , :t. ....... \ --- "::8'> , { '!'1 df ;, :;f;:; ':<t1 ;(, .. '. ' . :"t ,".. ., ,,, </. . . . :, ., .:y, ', M-.'''M " " :-;-., . -.::. '.: ''''''I' ,- ' 'è';i; . ; : : ::.. . w: ...;.:. ' ..' ->. ...-. . ," .: ti'".i' , ') \ . 2 :> &'" " J. Þ'.'1:' ',,<>'. oç " -.d#", :8." , '., ", , : . I ). . . ;;> & Æ';*',;" ,'::' ''I'm lookingfor a man who doesn't want anything to do with the wedding planning. " :" ::....,. also reduced the statute of limitations on those crimes; made it almost impossible for Italian prosecutors to introduce copies of foreign documents into evidence; and gave Berlusconi and his :&iends at least the possibility of requesting trials in courts that were more congenial than the one in Milan that usually indicts them. But it was a slow and unexpectedly public process, with Berlusconi scheduled to take over at the E.U. at the same time his trial was heading toward a verdict. The charges against him came down to an accusation that, in the late eighties, he had bribed two judges to stop the sale of a state food conglomerate called SME to Carlo De Benedetti, who is now the co- owner of La Repubblica and L'Espresso, and who was even then one of Berlu- sconi's most bitter and embatded rivals The evidence seemed solid, given that the man accused of being Berlusconi's bag- man had just been sentenced to eleven years in jail in a similar case involving the Prime Minister. And the court was said to have records that put the cuts and payoffs of the various middlemen somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred thou- sand dollars. Two weeks before Berlu- sconi's speech to the Strasbourg parlia- ment, his own parliament came through with a law that saved him. He is now, like many other European leaders, immune from prosecution for as long as his gov- ernment stands. The next national elec- tions are two and a half years awa)T. One thing was always clear: whatever happened, Berlusconi wasn't planning to step down. And by now he has managed to hold together the second-longest-lasting government in postwar Italian history- two years, four months, twenty-two days. (The record belongs to Craxi, with two back-to-back governments, lasting a total of three and a half years, in the nineteen- eighties.) It's a fact that comes up often in Berlusconi's conversation. "Before, the Italian Prime Minister would change every ten or eleven months," he told me, either making a slight revision in the first of his two terms or ignoring the six years between them, "and there was no possibility for him to build personal relationships with other Presidents or Prime Ministers." For the moment, he's coasting. But, at sixty-seven, he is over- weight, visibly under strain (he had pros- tate cancer in the late nineties), and still astonishingly ill-advised about his image